Bard Feedback: Love almost Everything, Anthem of Alacrity Seems Underwhelming

Bucky and all the Dev's who've worked on the Bard, amazing job!

LOVED the Bard showcase today! You can see the love for the class and the excitement to do something new after YEARS of boring (or non-existent) support classes in MMO's. The melodies were super cool, the dances looked amazing, the variety of skills, both offensive and defensive, was expansive; I cannot WAIT to play the class!

A couple observations/critiques/pieces of feedback:

1) Anthem of Alacrity seems...superfluous or underwhelming to me. It's a single target buff, takes 2 seconds to cast, and gives a 10 second attack speed/cast speed buff...to ONE target. I'm racking my brain trying to think when you'd use that over so many other abilities. It makes ONE ally do a little more damage for 10 seconds...maybe that's good during a raid boss? I feel like this ability would be way more interesting if it gave your entire party a small damage boost, but maybe on a longer cooldown, like shaman Bloodlust from WoW. Other people's thoughts?

2) Melody twisting: I LOVE the twisting mechanic in the passive tree which gives Bards the choice of having multiple melodies going at once if they invest the time into full casting each buff. I'd love if this twisting passive had multiple levels so bards could choose (with a large investment if needed for balance) to even have a 3rd or 4th melody buff stay active. This is reminiscent of Everquest Bard song twisting (my favorite class in an MMO ever) with a cleaned up, fleshed out mechanic. I especially love the melody playing in the background while other abilities stay usable. I'd love to see more options or upgrades for this style of gameplay!

3) Spell Effects: Maybe it was the stream quality, but when all the flashy lights of different abilities are happening in a dark room...visibility is REALLY difficult to parse and seems cluttered. The lighting, environments, animations look AMAZING, but the bright spell effects seem to overshadow or even BLOCK what the player can see in many situations. The more enemies on the screen and the more abilities players are using, the harder it is to tell what's happening for the player. I can only imagine how cluttered and overwhelming this would be in 8 person groups, full raids, or huge PVP situations.

Overall, the Bard showcase was super fun to watch, hearing Steven and the other Dev's banter makes the game feel alive, and getting to see the specific abilities showcased before going into an extended gameplay session really shows how the game is shaping up. This was my favorite showcase yet (from a totally unbiased Bard main)!

Kudos!
Rand118

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Noaani

Rand118 wrote: »

1) Anthem of Alacrity seems...superfluous or underwhelming to me. It's a single target buff, takes 2 seconds to cast, and gives a 10 second attack speed/cast speed buff...to ONE target. I'm racking my brain trying to think when you'd use that over so many other abilities. It makes ONE ally do a little more damage for 10 seconds...maybe that's good during a raid boss? I feel like this ability would be way more interesting if it gave your entire party a small damage boost, but maybe on a longer cooldown, like shaman Bloodlust from WoW. Other people's thoughts?

Cast speed buffs can be the most powerful buffs in the game.

Perhaps you know you need a lot of heals over the next few seconds - cast it on a healer. Cast it on an AoE healer while you are running percent increases to recieved healing, then watch people burn AoEs against that.

If not, cast it on a mage, and then this buff takes advantage of every other damage increasing buff or item that mage has. If the mage has a bonus to base damage, this makes that even better. If they have crit chance bonus, casting faster is better. If they have additional damage procs from casting, again, more casting means more of them.

In PvP I could also see an ability like this being put on someone running a lot of CC, though i don't know how viable this would actually be.

Rand118

Noaani wrote: »

Cast speed buffs can be the most powerful buffs in the game.

Perhaps you know you need a lot of heals over the next few seconds - cast it on a healer. Cast it on an AoE healer while you are running percent increases to recieved healing, then watch people burn AoEs against that.

If not, cast it on a mage, and then this buff takes advantage of every other damage increasing buff or item that mage has. If the mage has a bonus to base damage, this makes that even better. If they have crit chance bonus, casting faster is better. If they have additional damage procs from casting, again, more casting means more of them.

In PvP I could also see an ability like this being put on someone running a lot of CC, though i don't know how viable this would actually be.

True, I agree that cast speed buffs are SUPER strong, however...

It's a single target buff that lasts for 10 seconds. How many spells can a caster get off in 10 seconds? I'm assuming most spell casters have cast times between 1-3 seconds, and this buff was a 25% faster cast speed. I'm bad at math, but if the average cast time of a spell is 2 seconds, 25% faster would reduce that to 1.5 seconds. So if my math is correct, in 10 seconds, instead of 5 spells at 2 seconds per cast, they get 6.666 spells at 1.5 seconds per cast. Is 1.5 extra spells worth the bard casting for 2 seconds? Maybe? I feel like this buff should at least be instant cast for the Bard so they aren't stuck casting for 2 seconds for another player to get off 1 or 2 extra spells.

Again, I'm bad at math, but that just doesn't seem worth it to me.

I'm guessing we'd have to test it in game, but I don't think I saw Bucky cast it a single time during their gameplay session since it was much more useful throwing out an extra heal, mana song, aoe mezz or damage spell...basically ANYTHING but that 2 second cast time buff on a single ally.

ItsNoGood

It might be pretty useful because using Anthem of Alacrity with ranger mark or other dps burst window would stack multiplicatively together. If it is underpowered I'd rather they just buff the numbers rather than turn it into an AoE because I feel like single target buffs are more fun to use and bard already has plenty of AoE buffs/auras anyways.

Laetitian

I agree. Modern games (Including games kept modern through popularity & updates, e.g. WoW) generally suffer from making everything too low in effectiveness and short in duration (buffs, debuffs, CC), in order to create a more consistent baseline-balance, which leads to everything getting dominated by gear and fast-paced mechanics, while positioning, or skill path & skill use decision-making become streamlined, and of secondary importance.

The best way to counteract this is with more powerful baseline abilities, and more options of viable abilties to spec into and choose from in combat.

Basically, you could probably increase all skill values by 50% (obviously adjusted on exponential effectiveness like percental reductions), and most modern games would probably still be balanced, and more fun, because the results of your actions are more tangible.

All of which is to say I'd definitely support either doubling or tripling the duration of a single-target buff of that caliber, or otherwise ensuring its viability:
For example, instead of increasing the duration, if you could combo it with a massive 15-second-long single-target mana cost reduction buff (also 2 seconds cast time), the cooldown reduction would feel substantially more impactful and worthwhile. It'd still need to have pretty impressive cast speed improvements to be worth it though.
(And the mana cost reduction would be hard to balance; perhaps mana regeneration per spell cast would be more balanced, because it wouldn't reward mindlessly throwing out the most expensive spells as much. Or at least flat cost reduction instead of percental.)

Noaani

Rand118 wrote: »

How many spells can a caster get off in 10 seconds?

This is very much the wrong way to look at how a buff like this works.

As a mage, buffs like this are things that you create your build around. If your bard is just throwing it out at you randomly, then yeah, it's kind of useless. There should be communication between the bard and the reciever of this buff both before hand so the bard knows when the most opportune time to cast it is, and also during the fight so the reciever of the buff knows it's incoming.

The thing to keep in mind, you aren't just casting spells faster for 10 seconds. You are generating resources faster in that time, you are also starting your cooldowns faster. With the cast times mages have, we would be able to get off 12 - 14 spells in that 10 seconds the buff is up, that means 12 - 14 cooldowns that started earlier than they would have, meaning I can get the second cast of them off sooner than I would have been able to without this buff.

Perhaps the place your thinking is going off is that you are just looking at it as the reciever of the buff doing what they would do anyway, just faster. That is not how a buff like this should go - the reciever of the buff should be changing what they do in order to maximize the use of this buff (the specifics of which are based on the minute of the games combat system).

daveywavey

Rand118 wrote: »

... Bard Feedback...

There's an official feedback thread here: https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/59805/feedback-request-alpha-two-bard-archetype-preview-shown-in-july-livestream#latest

Rand118

daveywavey wrote: »

Rand118 wrote: »

... Bard Feedback...

There's an official feedback thread here: https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/59805/feedback-request-alpha-two-bard-archetype-preview-shown-in-july-livestream#latest

I did not realize there was a dedicated thread to this, my bad! I've made 2 bard feedback posts...I'll make sure to make any future posts into this thread, thank you!

Garrtok

Why not just posting it in the feedback thread?

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